Why Model and Activist Adwoa Aboah Is on a Mission for Mental Health

I don’t see Adwoa Aboah when she first walks into the expensively paneled restaurant in SoHo where we’re meeting for lunch. I’m hunched over my phone, desperate for any appropriate question to ask her for Allure’s Skin Guide that isn’t “Do you, uh, use moisturizer?” But then I hear “ ’ello!” and I look up and whoa, Jesus Christo, Aboah’s skin is incredible. Describing her freckle pattern as a series of swirling constellations is tempting but fails to capture their radiance. Her skin tone is what you’d get if you mixed pure honey with the crystalline waters of the Gulf of Guinea. She’s just come from a facial at Orentreich uptown, where she received a rigorous set of extractions — her skin turned bright red, then quelled to perfection. Now it gleams at a conservative 50 watts.

I would like to take this opportunity to be even more dramatic about how beautiful Aboah is, sitting across from me, a mortal with rosacea, in this heartbreakingly well-lit Italian restaurant: Her lips are crafted of candy porcelain, and a Chanel charm orthodontically affixed to her upper left central incisor means her teeth literally glint when she smiles.

The rest of her is swaddled in a plush Palace sweatsuit. (This, it occurs to me now, is the only appropriate outfit for pasta consumption.) We are surrounded by fancy people talking loudly. It’s fashion week, and this restaurant is trendy. I thought Aboah had picked it because she likes the food, but it also might be because every single person we encounter here is either an ardent admirer or her best friend.

A woman with messy platinum ringlets interrupts us at one point to kiss Aboah on both cheeks. She ignores me totally, which makes me think she is famous. “Who was that?” I ask. “Ellen von Unwerth.” While I am still reeling from this encounter, we run into Stella Maxwell, who is also famous and also gorgeous and also comfortably dressed in a two-piece sweatsuit. She almost screams at Aboah when she sees her. It is very startling to everybody except Aboah, who I think is used to it.

The most interesting encounter, though, happens when somebody follows us out of the restaurant to breathlessly tell her: “I didn’t want to bother you inside, but I’m such a huge fan, and I just wanted to tell you how much Gurls Talk has helped me, and, no, oh, my gosh, thank you so much.” She is near tears when they embrace.

Aboah’s story is the story of her nonprofit, Gurls Talk, but it’s also a story of healing, trauma, crazy success, and manic nosedives. She’s the star of a new era of supermodel, in which influence and impact are inextricable. Oh, yes, did I mention she’s also a model? She is, and she’s very good at it. If you want to know why, please revisit the first two paragraphs.

To borrow a popular metaphor, Aboah has had a roller-coaster few years. To tweak the metaphor, Aboah’s roller coaster starts somewhere in the Mariana Trench and then blasts upward to the cover of British Vogue. Aboah was born into the fashion world, the daughter of super agent Camilla Lowther and location scout Charles Aboah. Over the course of our conversation, Aboah invokes industry influentials like Katie Grand and Tim Blanks the way you might talk about your aunts and uncles.

“I didn’t think I could be [a model],” she says. “There were certain friends of my mom and dad’s who said I could model, blah, blah, blah, but I was insecure.” She got scouted but was never interested. It wasn’t until later, around age 17, that she signed with an agency. She did not take off instantly. “I don’t think I was confident enough, and I don’t think there was a space within the industry for somebody who looked like me. I worked; I did odd jobs. There were times I had money and times I didn’t. It was up and down.”

In her teens, Aboah also began experimenting heavily with drugs. Her ascent as a model ran in stark contrast to her struggles with addiction; in 2015, she attempted suicide, and that same year, her Italian Vogue cover hit newsstands. It was a turning point in the context of her career, according to Aboah, but it also marked the beginning of her recovery. Which led to Gurls Talk.

Gurls Talk is Aboah’s extended support network for young people to talk about a variety of topics, including sex, anxiety, antidepressants, and more. Despite its broad digital footprint, which includes Instagram, Facebook, and a YouTube channel, it’s designed to be an IRL experience. The first Gurls Talk event was held in London last July and featured sex education workshops, yoga, dance. The whole thing was free. That’s especially crucial to Aboah’s vision — breaking down any and all socioeconomic barriers to entry. “They have to be free. I don’t care if you think £5 isn’t a lot — it is to someone. And I want to make sure they have a place to come to,” she says.

“If I had somewhere I felt safe enough to talk about the things going on in my life, whether they be small or big, I don’t think I would have bottled up everything so much and had it fall to pieces during 2014,” she says of Gurls Talk.

Despite Gurls Talk’s Instagram presence, Aboah acknowledges the potentially toxic effects of social media on the malleable psyches of young people. “The jealousy it can make me have sometimes...” she thinks out loud. “It’s mental. It’s detrimental to everyone. Who is more successful, or rich, or beautiful — you’ll always be able to pick it out. Why didn’t I go to that party? You didn’t want to go in the first place. I try not to spend a lot of time on it.” But the point of Gurls Talk, which is not dissimilar to the more positive corners of the Internet, is to provide a network of safe spaces for girls (and boys, and everyone else) to talk openly about their formative experiences. The events are just the beginning.

If you get the sense that Aboah is an activist first, I think she would agree with you: When I ask her if models in 2018 have a duty to use their following for good, Aboah breathlessly agrees.

“One hundred percent. I had an argument with somebody the other day who said, ‘But what if they don’t have anything to say?’ Maybe you’re against fur, against animal cruelty; maybe it’s breast cancer — the list goes on. It’d be very sad if there wasn’t something you felt passionate about. There must be something you want to change. You have a responsibility. We all do. The ones with lots of followers have even more of a responsibility because you’re getting your image out there. You have the power. You can use it for good.”

The idea of “the new supermodel” has been rhapsodized ad nauseam lately, as not since the ’90s have we as a public been so obsessed with people who get paid to wear clothes. The phrase prematurely popped up a couple of years ago to describe the recent, explosive ascent of a handful of models riding the reality-television boon all the way to their own magazine covers. Now we live in a much different world than the Naomi-Cindy-Linda era, one where you cannot be a public person divorced from politics or activism — or a person engaged half-ass in, say, an ad campaign for a major soft drink company. A following means something, and you have to use it wisely.

Aboah exemplifies the “new supermodel” archetype in earnest: somebody who is captivating enough to land not one but two beauty contracts (Revlon and, previously, Marc Jacobs) and is also a conscious celebrity, whose modeling career is more or less synonymous with her mental health activism. (Gurls Talk, she says, is at the center of everything she does.) But it’s clear that Aboah really cares about the fashion industry she was raised in, especially as we discuss the photographer reckoning of late. (As of our lunch, several photographers, including Bruce Weber and Mario Testino, have been accused by models of sexual misconduct, allegations that representatives of both photographers have denied.)

“Get them out,” says Aboah. “I feel no sympathy. It’ll benefit everyone. It’ll benefit models; it’ll benefit younger designers, younger photographers, less established people within the industry — it’ll give them a chance.” This came up after our (her) brief encounter with von Unwerth. In a recent Time article, Kate Upton credits the photographer with helping her deflect a solo dinner with Guess cofounder Paul Marciano on a 2010 shoot, when she intimated she felt uncomfortable with him. (Upton claims Marciano had harassed her previously. Marciano has denied the allegations, and von Unwerth told Time she supports Upton but doesn’t recall the incident.)

And of the many things to be learned from Aboah, this engaged, thoughtful, powerful woman, it’s that solidarity is the antidote for the world we live in today. She maintains a sense of humor about her own struggles (on her style: “Like me, bipolar”), but she ascribes her success in overcoming addiction to the support of her friends and loved ones. She points to a tattoo on her wrists, a line from the poet Nayyirah Waheed’s book Nejma: “All the women. in me. are tired.” “I’m made up of many different women — my mum, sister, friends — who have all made me who I am. It reminds me that whatever I’m going through, there are lots of other women going through the same thing.”

Fashion stylist: Beth Fenton. Hair: Esther Langham. Makeup: Hannah Murray. Manicure: Honey. Set design: Peter Klein.

A version of this article originally appeared in Allure's Skin Guide issue. To get your copy, head to newsstands or subscribe now.

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